Karakterler

Counselor Niklausse

A man who moves like Van Tricasse's shadow, every bit as sluggish, indecisive, and silent as him. A prominent official of the town who would deliberate for ten years to vet every decision with the Mayor. Throughout the process that began with the city's illumination project and reached the point of social madness, the provocative, quarrelsome figure suppressed within him for years begins to emerge. In the end, he comes completely unhinged to the point of engaging in a hair-pulling brawl with the Mayor in the tower.

Doctor Ox

A genius, though strange and audacious, physiologist well-known in the European scientific world. Solely to prove that qualities such as virtue, courage, and intelligence are dependent on oxygen, he uses his wealth to establish a lighting factory in the town of Quiquendone and pumps pure oxygen into the town's atmosphere. He feels not the slightest pang of remorse while turning people—and even animals and plants—into objects of a massive experiment (in anima vili). He disappears after the factory explodes.

Gédéon Ygène

Doctor Ox's tall, confidant assistant used in the implementation of the experiment. The engineering of the project and the management of the gas valves are directly in his hands. Although he initially shares his mentor's scientific arrogance and looks down upon the townspeople, he shows some sign of conscience in the face of the people being pushed toward killing each other and tries to stop his master.

Van Tricasse

He is the mayor of the town of Quiquendone. The Van Tricasse family has governed the town for generations with the same mechanical and excessively stagnant system; he himself initially adopted the principle and virtue of deciding nothing. However, when exposed to Doctor Ox's gas, that calm, dull man turns into someone else: an angry, shouting, quick-decision-making warlord. After the disaster at the gas factory, he returns to his former self.